The beauty of working with Big Data in Azure is that you can manage (create\delete) compute resources with your HDInsight cluster independent of your data stored either in Azure Data Lake or Azure blob storage. In this case I will concentrate on using Azure blob storage\WASB as data store for HDInsWight Azure PaaS Hadoop service

With a typical Hadoop installation you load your data to a staging location then you import it into the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) within a single Hadoop cluster. That data is manipulated, massaged, and transformed. Then you may export some or all of the data back as resultset for consumption by other systems (think PowerBI, Tableau, etc)
Windows Azure Storage Blob (WASB) is an extension built on top of the HDFS APIs. The WASBS variation uses SSL certificates for improved security. It in many ways “is” HDFS. However, WASB creates a layer of abstraction that enables separation of storage. This separation is what enables your data to persist even when no clusters currently exist and enables multiple clusters plus other applications to access a single piece of data all at the same time. This increases functionality and flexibility while reducing costs and reducing the time from question to insight.

In Azure you store blobs on containers within Azure storage accounts. You grant access to a storage account, you create collections at the container level, and you place blobs (files of any format) inside the containers. This illustration from Microsoft’s documentation helps to show the structure:

Hold on, isn’t the whole selling point of Hadoop is proximity of data to compute? Yes, and just like with any other Hadoop system on premises data is loaded into memory on the individual nodes at compute time. With Azure data infrastructure setup and data center backbone within data center built for performance, your job performance is generally the same or better than if you used disks locally attached to the VMs.

Below is diagram of HDInsight data storage architecture:

HDInsight provides access to the distributed file system that is locally attached to the compute nodes. This file system can be accessed by using the fully qualified URI, for example:

hdfs:///

More important is ability access data that is stored in Azure Storage. The syntax is:

Container Security for WASB storage. For containers in storage accounts that are connected to cluster,because the account name and key are associated with the cluster during creation, you have full access to the blobs in those containers. For public containers that are not connected to cluster you have read-only permission to the blobs in the containers. For private containers in storage accounts that are not connected to cluster , you can’t access the blobs in the containers unless you define the storage account when you submit the WebHCat jobs.

The storage accounts that are defined in the creation process and their keys are stored in %HADOOP_HOME%/conf/core-site.xml on the cluster nodes. The default behavior of HDInsight is to use the storage accounts defined in the core-site.xml file. It is not recommended to directly edit the core-site.xml file because the cluster head node(master) may be reimaged or migrated at any time, and any changes to this file are not persisted.

You can create new or point existing storage account to HDinsight cluster easy via portal as I show below:

The <BlobStorageContainerName> identifies the name of the blob container in Azure storage. The <StorageAccountName> identifies the Azure Storage account name. A fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is required.

I ran into rather crazy little limitation\ issue when working with \WASB and HDInsight. Hadoop and Hive is looking for and expects a valid folder hierarchy to import data files, whereas WASB does not support a folder hierarchy i.e. all blobs are listed under a container. The workaround is to use SSH session to login into head cluster node and use mkdir command line command to manually create such directory via the driver.

Another one recommended to me was that “/” character can be used within the key name to make it appear as if a file is stored within a directory structure. HDInsight sees these as if they are actual directories.For example, a blob’s key may be input/log1.txt. No actual “input” directory exists, but due to the presence of the “/” character in the key name, it has the appearance of a file path.